Introducing Our Authors

Traveling, Photography, Video Gaming and Trying New Things in General My Ph.D. research is focused on the biosynthesis of nocardichelin, an iron scavenging molecule classified as a siderophore.Siderophores can be produced by the activity of the modular Nonribosomal Peptide Synthetase (NRPS) or by NRPS Independent Siderophore (NIS) pathway that always contains a specialized NIS synthetase.The characterization of siderophores can facilitate biomedical applications such as creating siderophore-antibiotic conjugates that harbor an antibiotic disguised by the iron binding moieties for entry into the cell.In this article, we identify the nocardichelin biosynthetic gene cluster (BGC) encoding an unusual pathway for siderophore biosynthesis that includes an NRPS module and an NIS synthetase.From this BGC, we reconstitute one of the three core intermediates required to create nocardichelin, characterizing four enzymes biochemically accompanied by two protein structures solved via Xray crystallography.With our results and discoveries from this BGC, we predict the full pathway to nocardichelin and describe the remaining questions that we hope to answer in future studies.